...Hardcore proponents of the cyber currency don't pay much attention to the day-to-day noise. It's largely irrelevant, they reckon....

In the war of currency attrition, they're prepared to wait it out...to watch as the government-issued paper around them begins to burn...leaving their cyber currency to stand tall...divisible down to (for now) eight decimal places....

But one must admire the conviction of these fringy individuals. They are embroiled in an age old battle of man vs. state, liberty vs. control, freedom vs. slavery. Bitcoin just happens to be their weapon of choice....

The cyber subject actually came up a few weeks ago. Your editor was hosting an asado here in Buenos Aires...

The security error above is a real worry to me too. It seems to be similar to the one that the Avalon website had. As I haven't seen any public statements about this - I'm beginning to wonder if it's some sort of man-in-the-middle attack on Bitcoin-related websites.

Also.. I've been unable to login since the site update - and I have not received any shipping info for an order placed over 10 days ago.I know it's a beta site - but this is almost enough to scare me back to using 'good-old' reversible credit card merchants

...The move should give the news sharing site a boost in revenue, especially from international users that are unable to pay via credit card or PayPal for one reason or another....Reddit joins a handful of organizations now accepting Bitcoin payments: Dewlance, Diaspora, 4chan, Wiki Leaks, Uploaded.to, The Internet Archive, and, more recently, WordPress operator Automattic.

Yet the vast majority of businesses are not on board, which could have something to do with Bitcoin’s perception of being an unsecure method of payment as well as the currency of choice for criminals. But that may change over time since Bitcoin doesn’t have the same limitations as a currency that’s tied to a government....

With legitimized exchanges like Coinbase offering bank-level encryption (and processing over $1 million worth of Bitcoin transactions per month), it may just be a matter of time before it starts appearing next to PayPal, Visa, Master Card, and Google Wallet — especially with support from Reddit’s highly effective active user base....

...The popular social-news site Reddit said it will now accept bitcoins, following blogging platform WordPress in embracing the four-year-old virtual currency....The virtual currency is looking increasingly attractive to online merchants, who run the risk of incurring a "chargeback" by banks if someone fraudulently makes a purchase with someone else's credit card details. Due to its cryptographic verification system, bitcoins cannot be fraudulently spent, which relieves merchants of chargeback worries....WordPress announced in November that it would accept bitcoins, opening up some of the blogging platform's paid-for features to people in countries not supported by credit card companies and PayPal....

The anonymous digital currency Bitcoin, which is already accepted on the Wordpress blogging site, has another mainstream partner. Reddit, the social news and entertainment site, now accepts bitcoins as payment for Reddit Gold, a subscription service.

...Even though the cryptocurrency has a less than pristine reputation, prominent companies have begun accepting it. ..."Despite its considerable potential, Bitcoin is still very new, experimental, and no one really knows what will happen with it and what people will do with it," says Reddit CEO Yishan Wong in a post on reddit. "This means that there is the possibility that unexpected or bad things happen, and we may have to modify or suspend our implementation of Bitcoin support if that happens."...

...Spanish authorities, working with the European Union's law enforcement agency, Europol, arrested 11 people, from Russia, Georgia and Ukraine....The gang had been receiving the money in a variety of ways - including using virtual currency such as Bitcoin, Europol said....

Bitcoin is the “underground” digital money system that’s fueling growth and disruption in the online payment space....While Reddit isn’t exactly a “mainstream” site yet, it is definitely the most widely used site to start accepting bitcoin that I can think of. ...Will Reddit push bitcoin into the mainstream? We will see, but as usual, the Redditors have gotten what they’ve wanted.

...So is the new Bitcoin price rise a bubble? I don’t think so. Nothing like Bitcoin has ever existed before, so it’s not clear how to compute a “fundamental” value for it. ...

But Bitcoin is a sufficiently novel technology, with security and privacy features traditional financial networks can’t match, that it seems likely that people will find something cool to do with it. And when they do, they’ll need to get their hands on a lot of Bitcoins. So I’m not ready to sell mine yet.

Already it is the most powerful and widespread network the world has ever seen ...

I think this bit needs a little reworking.While I've heard bitcoin referred to as the most powerful distributed supercomputer (which is itself debatable - as that's pretty much just raw crunch power for a very narrow task) - it seems a real stretch to refer to it as the 'most powerful' network. It also seems to me that there must be other networks which are more widespread (the internet itself springs to mind).

True...... the internet itself violates what I said. I was trying not to get too technical...... but that will definitely need to be changed. How about if I just replace network with "program" ?

I don't think it can legitimately be described as the 'most powerful and widespread program' either. Undoubtedly things like skype have a vastly bigger userbase and are thus more widespread - not to mention operating systems like Windows and Android etc too!

You probably have to be quite specific to describe it as 'most powerful'. Something like 'the most powerful distributed computing system in terms of sheer number-crunching'.I dunno. Maybe others have better rewording suggestions.

There is no fee. Yes, that's right... transferring the money across countries to another part of the world costs nothing.

I know you're not the only one to claim this, but I'm uncomfortable describing it this way. The fee is minimal - and sometimes optional, but when a new user decides to try to split a wallet with some nice round number of Bitcoins into parts - they might be annoyed to find that shuffling their own money around can give them unexpected fractions.

Imagine too; someone who has received 1BTC as an experimental introduction to Bitcoin and finds something online to buy for exactly 1BTC. It doesn't matter how tiny the fee is - that experience is going to be frustrating when they read about it as 'no fees'.

Also, you begin too many sentences with the word 'But', but that's somewhat open to personal writing taste I guess.

Already it is the most powerful and widespread network the world has ever seen ...

I think this bit needs a little reworking.While I've heard bitcoin referred to as the most powerful distributed supercomputer (which is itself debatable - as that's pretty much just raw crunch power for a very narrow task) - it seems a real stretch to refer to it as the 'most powerful' network. It also seems to me that there must be other networks which are more widespread (the internet itself springs to mind).

The irony I see in this guy's position is that he claims to be taking the 'emotion' out of the equation, yet his stance on Bitcoin, particularly his claims of 'ponzi' appear to be just the usual kneejerk emotional reactions people have to Bitcoin.He hasn't done a deep analysis - doesn't understand the nature of Bitcoin or its (evolving) feature set and ecosystem - and so is taking a very 1 dimensional view of it.

...I don't see in any way that Bitcoin is a replacement for the dollar. It is a ponzi scheme.It's not at all any better than the federal reserve system. It's in fact much worse than the federal reserve system in so many ways

...In fact Ironically.. I could now be scandalously wealthy if I had bought Bitcoins back when I was doing videos when they were like at 1 and 2....So it is a bitcoin beatdown. Absolutely.Bitcoins have been the investment of the last 3 years. In ways that we might not see ever again.These sort of percents are astounding. They're incredible....I'm gonna start doing regular Bitcoin commentary. Absolutely. Bitcoins are forreal.They're not a replacement for the dollar. No No. They don't replace the federal reserve system.They're not the panacea they're not the magic elixir. But they're the real deal as far as a trading vehicle is concerned....